for the first challenge other start on October 9th, I thought you might like something to read. This is triggered by my visit to the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, where I am spending some time this semester, and where Andrew Wiles first announced his proof of Fermat’s last theorem. That was a long time ago (1993) but it is still celebrated as one of the major achievement of 20th Century mathematics.
It doesn’t (yet) have a lot to do with cryptography, though the proof uses the beautiful geometry of elliptic curves which do play a major role in the security of our communications systems. In any case it is a great story, and was well told by an old friend of the National Cipher Challenge, Simon Singh. If you are interested you can read his short account here.
PS, the image above is of a board written by Wiles during a talk at the Institute and preserved and displayed as a work of art. I only know of one other blackboard that was preserved like that, and maybe I will tell you about it some other time, but I do find blackboards beautiful. If you know of any others, why not tell us about them in the forum?
